On Friday an article made waves through the WoW themed
twitter bases and as always I play catch up to these things because I follow
the very edges of this community having only really concerned myself with gold
making while I was in the game. The
article in question is obviously Polygon’s opinion piece Erasing
your audience isn't 'fun' written by Todd Harper. In the article he is
described as an MIT researcher in their Game Lab specializing in eSports and queer/gender
representation in games.
When I was going through the article and organizing what I
thought about this it became clear that I needed to separate my thoughts (and
now by extension my post) into my analysis of points and arguments brought up in
the source piece and then distant from that decide how I think this subject
matter in general affects games and ‘gaming culture’ so bear with me as I first
break down the article and then ramble through a much more generalized opinion
maybe later.
